When it comes to website speed, slow and steady will never win the race for market share.
Think of your website like a race car. Pole position on the racetrack is important, but it doesn’t guarantee a win. When you consider its value and performance relative to selling cars, a blazing fast website is your marketing cornerstone.
Speed matters. According to Google, website speed has been a ranking factor for several years. However, it has primarily focused on desktop searches. This changed on January 17 of this year, when Google announced that page speed will be a mobile ranking factor beginning in July 2018. They’re calling it the “Speed Update” and they say it will affect mobile websites that deliver the slowest experience to searchers. If your website is the slow car, this is bad news. If your website is the slow car and no one wants to drive it, this is even worse.
Staying on the track matters.
Stay focused on getting the most out of your website before spending time in the echo chambers of our industry, or you might find yourself blindly following ideas and trends that amount to wasted time. Digital retailing, attribution, and BI tools are just a few of the hot topics I hear about daily. Unfortunately, it’s usually from dealers who have given up or don’t know how to hold their website provider accountable. While some of what’s new may be good for dealers, it’s easy to be distracted when you’re ignoring bigger issues, like website speed. When you disregard the performance of your most important marketing tool, you make yourself a prime candidate for those offering solutions to problems you don’t actually have.
Conversion matters.
Take it from a car guy who grew up in the business and then built a successful automotive website company from the ground up: website leads are not dead! No dealer should be happy with a website struggling to convert 2% of its visitors. When you consider how much money your dealership spends to drive traffic to its website, increasing your conversions becomes a high priority. Someone telling you consumers no longer fill out forms on websites is someone selling worthless websites.
See you in the winner’s circle.
It’s true, new technology and variations of existing tech continue to impress us and often easily steal our attention. But it’s crucial to focus on tuning your website for higher
performance so you can grip the wheel and start winning some races. If your engine has already blown cylinders, make a change soon, because no one enters a race hoping to lose.
The formula for your dealership to win is simple: speed + conversion wins the race. Focus on these two things, and you’ll sell more cars — guaranteed.